American War Hero's Life Destroyed by McCarthyism

Raymond Caballero will discuss his new book McCarthyism vs. Clinton Jencks. For twenty years after World War II, the national fear over communism generated such anxiety that Communist Party members and many left-wing Americans lost the laws’ protections.

Jencks, a decorated war hero, adopted as his own the Mexican American fight for equal rights in New Mexico’s mining industry. In 1950 he led a local of the International Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers in the famed Empire Zinc strike, in which wives and mothers replaced strikers on the picket line after an injunction barred the miners themselves. Three years after the strike, Jencks was arrested and charged with falsely denying that he was a Communist and was sentenced to five years in prison.

In McCarthyism vs. Clinton Jencks, Caballero reveals for the first time that the FBI and the prosecution knew all along that Clinton Jencks was innocent. The tale of Jencks’s quest for justice provides a fresh glimpse into the McCarthy era’s oppression, which irrevocably damaged the lives, careers, and reputations of thousands of Americans.

Raymond Caballero is an independent historian whose research has long focused on Mexico, especially the Mexican Revolution. He is the author of Orozco: The Life and Death of a Mexican Revolutionary.